LOLcats CEO on Failure: ‘Part of Our Culture’

Ben Huh, one of the people behind the popular site I Can Has Cheezburger, has been talking up a storm with media outlets since the publication of two books, “I Can Has Cheezburger?: A LOLcat Colleckshun” and “How to Take Over Teh Wurld: A LOLcat Guide 2 Winning.”

Pet Holdings

One of the LOLcats featured on I Can Has Cheezburger

Interviews with Mr. Huh, chief executive of Pet Holdings, Cheezburger’s parent company, appeared Monday in AdAge and Entertainment Weekly. Excerpts from both, in which he dishes on the 4chan origins of LOLcats, where he sees his sites fitting into a consumer’s day, and the fact that he’s actually a dog person.

From AdAge:On his big-media aspirations: “We’re just going through the process of creating content that makes people happy for just a few minutes a day. We are not trying to be a TV network; we’re not trying to be a big media company. We are growing small things that are gathering loyal audiences. When you show up and you want to laugh or take a break from your daily work, then we have this little blog for you. You go, load the page, you scroll, and you’re done.”

AdAge asks, “Are you funny?” “I love the fact people think I do this out of my garage! I am a business person. Let’s put it this way, no LOLcat I have ever created has made the home page.”

On failure: “We have lots of fails. I call our new blog-development team the ‘Skunkworks’ not because it’s secretive but because most of our ideas stink. We had a failure called 140pedia. Great idea, good content, just didn’t build traffic fast enough. But that’s how you get to success. It’s a part of our culture to fail.”

From EW’s Shelf Life blog:On where LOLcats came from: “The origin of LOLcats came from an Internet forum called 4chan, which is a NSFW place. And these images over the year had made it to other forums around the Internet. So when the two co-founders [Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami] came along, they didn’t know the origin. They just saw the images and they’re like, ‘I’ve seen these all over the place. I’m going to start a blog to collect them and keep them in one place.’ They were pre-captioned images. And then they built a captioning system, and that’s when things really changed. People started submitting them, and it became a phenomenon.”

On living vicariously through other people’s cats: “I’m a dog guy. I have a dog. But I really wish I could also have a cat. And this was a great way to live vicariously through other cats. When I first went to the site in April 2007, I didn’t get it. I was like, ‘What the heck’s wrong with the spelling? I can’t read this. This is weird.’ And for some reason, I went back. Still didn’t get it. But the third time I went back, there was a photo that made me laugh. And then I got it. And I realize that was part of the challenge of icanhascheezburger. People don’t really understand it initially, and they kind of dismiss it. But Internet’s a lovely place, where you forward stuff to your friends over and over again, and it’s happened to enough people that it created this great community around this site.”

On LOLspeak: “It’s basically a pidgin [language] that was formed purely online. It used to be that when you spoke a different language, or when you spoke slang, it was geographically limited by a subculture. But as an Internet culture, people started writing something across the globe in the same manner, pretty much the same time, without speaking it, and without any cultural connections. So it’s the formation of a new language basically through Internet, which hasn’t really happened before. In this case, there’s not talking. In fact, the voice that you have of a lolcat in your head is probably very different than the voice I have in my head of a lolcat. And in fact, when people ask me to read aloud a lolcat caption, I actually decline to do so, because I don’t want to ruin what they have in their heads.”